Number of the Month

November 2007

Clever?

People are reporting this
as a clever hoax. What is so clever about it when the first equation is
obviously just a string of symbols and signs arranged by someone without the
faintest knowledge of mathematical conventions? A really clever hoaxer, if not
able to get advice from a schoolboy student of mathematics, would have copied an
equation from any scientific journal.

Verbal hoaxing is relatively easy, when each branch of
science develops its own jargon to fend off interlopers, but the language of
mathematics is universal. The really successful hoax of our time, Alain
Sokal’s demolition
of the pretensions of the post-modern movement, succeeded because his targets
habitually talked nonsense about
mathematics rather than using the language of that subject.

Nevertheless, this hoax had a disturbing, if brief, period
of success (Number Watch received it
from three different sources). Its target seems to be the political hangers-on
to the diminished band of scientists who still practise the sceptical approach.
Some of them fell for it, hook, line and cliché; through neglect of one of the
central principles of scepticism – if it seems to be good to be true, it is
too good to be true. There were obvious other technical defects, such as the
perfect sine wave graph, but even the relatively innumerate should have enough
experience of life to know that treasure simply does not fall into your lap like
that. But give the hoaxer his due, it was neatly done and convincingly
presented. Perhaps it will have caused a useful lesson to be learned.

A small turn for the
better

A better class of stunt from Stuntman Dave. As the
Englishman says "Keep it up Dave!"

Anything that offends the master
hoaxer Chris Huhne must have something going for it.

08/11/07

Excuses, excuses

Thanks to all those who enquired. The recent period of ill
health experienced by your bending author ran into the annual period of purdah
caused by the need to prepare accounts. It is a measure of the irony of accounts
that the preparation takes as long now as it did when the “firm” was a
consultancy practice with 100 times the present turnover. Then a parcel arrived,
which turned out to be a review copy of “Scared to death” and it seemed to
be worth a bit of priority. See the conclusions here.
The next priority is to deal with the dissatisfied customers who have ordered
books and have not yet received them: wretched apologies to them if they read
this. The hope is to get back to some form of stuttering productivity of
diatribes within the next few days.

25/11/07

Number
of the month 400

400 C is the temperature reached on the surface of Venus.
The media are full of the
report from the operators of the latest space probe.

The lengths to which some modern “scientists” will go
to distort their science to make it conform to their religion can be quite
extraordinary. Much of the media picked up on the suggestion that Venus is the
hell hole it is because of runaway global warming. The value of some fascinating
scientific observation is all but destroyed by the trivial theological
interpretation imposed by believers among the elite.

"In the light of the new data it is possible to
construct a scenario in which the climates on Venus and Earth were very similar
when they started out, and then evolved to the state we see now, like twins
separated at birth. Billions of years ago there is even the possibility that
Venus would have been habitable."

It is always possible to construct all sorts of scenarios,
but is it science? The probe tells us what it is like today. How does that paint
a scenario of billions of years ago? The past history of the earth was painfully
established by centuries of geology. Could you do the same by satellite
observations? How could the two planets be regarded as twins, when one of them,
by the immutable inverse square law, receives almost twice the radiation density
of the other? We observe that, by terrestrial standards, Venus is bloody hot and
Mars is bleedin’ cold. While admitting that, for example, the eventual
presence or absence of an atmosphere and its nature will have a considerable
influence; do we need anything more than the inverse square law to differentiate
them?

But there is another and more delightful curiosity in this
account. The carbon dioxide theory is accepted by more or less everybody to be
inadequate to support the required threat of a global warming catastrophe. It is
a self-limiting process (logarithmic) that cannot lead to instability. Therefore
the servants of the alarmist cause have been obliged to call in water vapour to
provide a feedback factor in their computer models (and by now we all know what feedback
can do in computer models). These new
alarmists seem to have forgotten this when they observe that all the water has
been driven off Venus (to be more accurate, it has been stripped off by the
solar wind, which apparently has the power to differentiate between water and
all the other atmospheric components).

How then could such a global warming catastrophe come
about? The second reader comment to the Telegraph
piece has the answer:

It’s obvious that life on Venus developed at a far faster rate than
that of Earth. The Venusians obviously were far quicker at developing fossil
fuel power stations, gas guzzling 4X4s and kept their heating at far too high a
level.

The number of the month is posted late. Your bending author
was idly contemplating the pleasures of life under a regimen of steroid
tapering, with the intention of raising
the effort to put together a piece
as above, when all hell broke loose. The harbinger was the admirable Sandy
Szwarc, who e-mailed to say that Rush Limbaugh was reading out the entire
contents of the warm list on his radio show. By the end of the day Number Watch had experienced 36,000 page views and the back log of
incoming e-mails (not including the usual 300 odd spam messages) had grown to
dispiriting proportions. The list was included on American
Thinker and thence linked on a few dozen other sites. The hit statistics
boiled over with new links.